Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Scheer: McNamara's Evil Lives On, Black Caucus Muzzled on McKinney Kidnapping

Hi. I've eagerly awaited this column.

Bob Scheer was the editor and best writer of Ramparts, the most effective
journal of the Peace & Justice mass movement of the 1960's. I'll never
forget a panel debate before a full house in UCLA's Royce Hall, with a
couple of academics, Bob, and a top general, recently back from Vietnam.
I can't remember his name, but he ran on, definitively, about light at the
end of the tunnel, the 'pacification' program, etc. Bob rose to the podium,
pulled out a couple of pages from his pocket and read passages from a
study commissioned by the Pentagon, by directive of McNamera, which
contradicted everything the good general had just said. It was all over,
though the panel went throught the motions. And indeed, those were
a couple of the Pentagon Papers mentioned below.
Ed

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090707_robert_scheer_july_8_column/

McNamara's Evil Lives On

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: July 7, 2009

Why not speak ill of the dead?

Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man-charming even, in a
blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I interviewed him.
In the third act of his life he was often an advocate for enlightened
positions on world poverty and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. But
whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as
secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him.

To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock
the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed
and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much
has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that
came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.

Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead
innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide
or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs
and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are
America's leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if
McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects
of the Iraq debacle might have paused.

Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon
Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering
this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: "The picture of the world's
greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a
week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an
issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."

He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never
left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after
the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he
had unleashed was all too clear:

"Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area
as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a
period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed-there were
killed-3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My
God! The killing, the tonnage-it was fantastic. The problem was that we were
trying to do something that was militarily impossible-we were trying to
break the will; I don't think we can break the will by bombing short of
genocide."

We-no, he-couldn't break their will because their fight was for national
independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat the Americans
who took over when French colonialists gave up the ghost. The war was a lie
from the first. It never had anything to do with the freedom of the
Vietnamese (we installed one tyrant after another in power), but instead had
to do with our irrational Cold War obsession with "international communism."
Irrational, as President Richard Nixon acknowledged when he embraced détente
with the Soviet communists, toasted China's fierce communist Mao Tse-tung
and then escalated the war against "communist" Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.

It was always a lie and our leaders knew it, but that did not give them
pause. Both Johnson and Nixon make it quite clear on their White House tapes
that the mindless killing, McNamara's infamous body count, was about
domestic politics and never security.

The lies are clearly revealed in the Pentagon Papers study that McNamara
commissioned, but they were made public only through the bravery of Daniel
Ellsberg. Yet when Ellsberg, a former Marine who had worked for McNamara in
the Pentagon, was in the docket facing the full wrath of Nixon's Justice
Department, McNamara would lift not a finger in his defense. Worse, as
Ellsberg reminded me this week, McNamara threatened that if subpoenaed to
testify at the trial by Ellsberg's defense team, "I would hurt your client
badly."

Not as badly as those he killed or severely wounded. Not as badly as the
almost 59,000 American soldiers killed and the many more horribly hurt. One
of them was the writer and activist Ron Kovic, who as a kid from Long Island
was seduced by McNamara's lies into volunteering for two tours in Vietnam.
Eventually, struggling with his mostly paralyzed body, he spoke out against
the war in the hope that others would not have to suffer as he did (and
still does). Meanwhile, McNamara maintained his golden silence, even as
Richard Nixon managed to kill and maim millions more. What McNamara did was
evil-deeply so.

***

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22996.htm

No Comment on Kidnapping of McKinney

Black Caucus Muzzled

By Russell Mokhiber

Counterpunch: July 07, 2009

Got to hand it to J. Jioni Palmer.

He's learned the ropes of Washington well.

Palmer is the spokesperson for the Congressional Black Caucus.

Rang up Palmer on Wednesday.

Wanted to know whether the Congressional Black Caucus and
Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California), it's chair, had any comment on the
hijacking of the Free Gaza boat - the Spirit of Humanity.

On board - a former Congressional Black Caucus member - Cynthia
McKinney.

On June 30th 2009 Israeli Occupation Forces forcibly boarded the boat.

They kidnapped McKinney, Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire
and 19 other human rights workers and journalists who were on their way to
deliver much needed humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to besieged
Gaza.

So, I just wanted to know from Jioni Palmer - uh, given that McKinney
is a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus, you have a comment on
the hijacking, right?

No comment, Jioni said.

Okay, Jioni, how do I spell your name.

What, you are going to quote me saying no comment?

No, Jioni, I'm going to quote you as saying - We're so freaked out
about pissing off AIPAC, that of course, we're not going to issue a
statement condemning the hijackers. Who gives a rat's ass whether Cynthia
McKinney is being held in a jail in the Israeli port city of Ashdod?

Because that's what you should say, Jioni, if you were telling the
truth.

But you're BS-ing your way - the Washington way.

You send me an e-mail asking exactly what I'm after.

I tell you.

So you say - uh, well, let me get back to you.

You don't get back to me.

I ring you up again.

I'm trying to get something for you - you say.

My apologies if I don't meet your deadline -- you say.

Well, don't apologize to me, Jioni.

Apologize to the Palestinian prisoners of Gaza.

It's not about you or me or McKinney and her colleagues in jail in
Israel.

It's about basic human decency.

Check it out at www.freegaza.org.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of Corporate Crime Reporter and founder of
www.singlepayeraction.org

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